XenServer is Free
- Thread starter Bozo
- Start date
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
That's actually kind of a big deal. I hope it pushes more features in to competing products.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
Would Xen Server 6.2 be a good option to run a bunch of Microsoft Server 2012 std servers in VMs? I was going to recommend to go with Server 2012 Datacenter, even though it is ~3700$ a pop. I would have run the Server 2012 VM under Hyper-V. VMWare VSphere is too expensive, even if it's probably the easiest to maintain.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Well, it WILL run on Xen 6.2, which is an improvement. And since the hypervisor is basically Linux, you've got access to a much broader array of tools. I went with ESXi for my current project because at the time I started researching, Xen didn't support Server 2012. ESXi is kind of awful in that you pretty much have to hack everything together yourself. I'm sure it's better with Vsphere but of course that's incredibly expensive.
ESX/ESXi and vSphere are the same thing. I believe it's called VMware vSphere ESXi. ESXi is the core product and vSphere is more of a marketing name. When you buy a license for vSphere ESXi you're allowed to use more physical resources and management features. The use-case you implemented is somewhat atypical to their product or customer base so it would be a pain to hack that solution together (and I'm referring to the self-firewalled management port). However much a pain it was to hack together it's still rather neat that it allows you to do so given their architecture. You chose to save money and resources by not implementing a standalone firewall product and therefore paid for it in increased complexity and hacking of a product. Otherwise I'm not quite sure what you mean by ESXi being awful in that you have to hack everything together?
ddrueding
Fixture
The part that springs to mind for me is the backup options. Either very expensive add-ons, or down-time. With down time you have manual or hacked-together. All distasteful IMHO.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
I tend to think of vSphere as the management client, but yes, the backup options are... distasteful. vicfg-cfgbackup -s blah.local to get the host personality + ghettovcb.sh to handle the VMs.It's yucky.
You're right, it is call the vSphere client but that's the only means to manage an ESXi server even if you paid money or not. The same thick client is also used to connect to the paid vCenter management product but is on the way out as its replacement is going to be a web-based client.
True, from a VM management perspective outside the guest OS you have to pay some money to find a viable working solution. Have either of you tried the Veeam Backup & Replication package demo? Backups shouldn't be seen as terribly different had you deployed a bare metal host running the respective OS. Just because your host is virtualized doesn't automatically mean that backups diverge from traditional means. Medium-large to large enterprise may also spend time managing backups based on creating LUN snapshots in a rotating fashion and let the array or other means manage the backups from the entire datastore level.
True, from a VM management perspective outside the guest OS you have to pay some money to find a viable working solution. Have either of you tried the Veeam Backup & Replication package demo? Backups shouldn't be seen as terribly different had you deployed a bare metal host running the respective OS. Just because your host is virtualized doesn't automatically mean that backups diverge from traditional means. Medium-large to large enterprise may also spend time managing backups based on creating LUN snapshots in a rotating fashion and let the array or other means manage the backups from the entire datastore level.
ddrueding
Fixture
I had a paid Veeam licence for over 2 years. It did work as advertized, but was never as easy as I would have liked. And in one instance consistently delivered corrupt backups. Granted the VM was in bad shape, but a warning that the backup wouldn't have been bootable would have been nice.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
It's not horrible to use any old random SCP client. I have an old copy of Veeam but I never observed backups to be fast enough to make messing with, especially since it's not scriptable. I generally back up to an attached virtual drive and periodically stop the VM, copy the whole VM to a Backup folder, restart the VM and then move the copy to another drive. That at least minimizes downtime. Mostly though, backing up using native backup from virtual disks is fine. Restoring Windows backups takes around the same amount of time as copying the .vmdk files.
I do definitely pay more attention to what's happening with those backups in general.
I do definitely pay more attention to what's happening with those backups in general.
One of the tricks from years ago to have online backups was to create a snapshot of a VM and then backup the VMDK files and then revert the snapshot when the backup is complete. I believe VMware APIs exist to do this today if you wanted to script some of it. This allowed you a point in time copy of the VM that was restorable while also keeping the VM online and functioning. This was the basic premise behind the VMWare consolidated backup functionality. I don't know if it has changed since when I used it last but it looks like it's still available. The problem is the cost for the license is very high for a small business shop. Solutions exist to help manage the problem on larger scales, they just aren't cost-effective for everyone.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Two hours of down time once a month is a lot more palatable for the people I'm working for than tens of thousands in software licensing costs.
Just to be even slightly on topic here, I can see a mature and free XenServer going over very, very well in an modern server room simply because it DOES have decent backup tools and management options, as opposed to ESX or Hyper-V, which has some weird hack-y issues all its own and terribly expensive licensing for any but the biggest operations. That's where I was coming from with my initial post in the thread.
Just to be even slightly on topic here, I can see a mature and free XenServer going over very, very well in an modern server room simply because it DOES have decent backup tools and management options, as opposed to ESX or Hyper-V, which has some weird hack-y issues all its own and terribly expensive licensing for any but the biggest operations. That's where I was coming from with my initial post in the thread.